best villain death ..?
i always thought it was one of the greats.
just totally cartoonish and weird.
and yet it kind of made sense within the context of the film.
https://whatculture.com/film/10-actors-who-hated-their-own-movie-death-scenes?page=5
The James Bond franchise generally tries to give its villains memorable deaths, and few are more iconic - or hilarious - than that of Live and Let Die's Dr. Kananga (Yaphet Kotto).share
At the end of the film, 007 (Roger Moore) forces the antagonist to swallow a compressed gas pellet typically used in shark guns, which promptly causes Kananga's body to comically balloon up, fly out of the shark tank, and explode in mid-air.
As amusing as it is, it's insanely silly even for the standards of Moore-era Bond, and Kotto himself, a serious actor who had previously appeared on Broadway, didn't much care for such a ridiculous demise. He said:
"The way Kananga dies was a joke... The entire experience was not as rewarding as I wanted it to be."
Kotto generally didn't have a good time making the film either, saying of the script's depiction of his character:
"There were so many problems with that script... I had to dig deep in my soul and brain and come up with a level of reality that would offset the sea of stereotype crap that Tom Mankiewicz wrote that had nothing to do with the Black experience or culture.
It was the first Black Bond villain, I wanted to be original... but there was nothing I could draw on from Tom’s script. It was a trap. If I had played it the way it was written, every Black organization in the world would have been on my case."
It was the silly plastic balloon with a suit on that ruined it. No wonder they added a camera zoom in post production to try and make it look less ridiculous.
shareEven if they had modern CGI to make it look better, it still would have been pretty laughable, though.
That death was like something out of a Loony Tunes cartoon.
Very poor shot.
Could barely tell what it was supposed to be.
But I also agree Kotto was one of the best villains.
I was actually scared of him.
He was also quite convincing as the two separate characters.
So much so that every time I see it (every decade or so), I’m surprised anew.